For the 1955 production of Lady and the Tramp, Disney abandoned the practice of relying on famous children’s classics(Snow White, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Alice, Peter Pan) as the basis for its animated features. Instead, Disney turned to Ward Greene's raffish short story, “Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog,” the romantic adventure of a pedigreed cocker spaniel and a freedom-loving mongrel from the wrong side of the tracks. Though early story evelopment began at the studio during World War Il, it was not until 1951 that production began in earnest. It was completed four years later at a cost of $4 million.
The decision to produce the film in the new wide screen process, CinemaScope, was in keeping with Walt Disney's fascination with new techniques and mediums. Disney had pioneered the use of 3-strip Technicolor, the multi-plane camera and FantaSound to name a few of the studio's most famous technical innovations. Disney's live action film of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was among the very earliest of CinemaScope films to go into production.
Traditionally, animated and live action films had been shot using the standard Academy Aperture with a nearly square aspect ratio of 1.33:1. This had been the de facto standard since the days of Edison. But when the new electronic medium of television adopted this standard, the movies were forced to change. Producers turned to wide screens and stereophonic sound in attempt to recapture an audience that was staying at home to watch Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan on black-and-white 19-inch screens.
For Lady and the Tramp; the use of this new widescreen process made new demands on the Disney artists, requiring not only larger paper and cels, but a whole new approach to layout and editing.
Backgrounds had to be larger, some were up to 10-feet wide, and much more detailed. Animators found that individual scenes played longer in CinemaScope. Rapid cutting from character to character for reaction shots was abandoned. Instead, scenes were played out in full “master shots” rather than as a series of rapid cuts between different points of view.
[…]
